Alexander Morse

I’m not at all qualified to be writing a programming blog.

I can prove it, too. For my very first post, I give you a story about how I created a rigged challenge for myself, then managed to fail that challenge in the most painful and embarrassing way possible.

The Fun and Easy Challenge

The whole mess started sometime during March 2021. I realized that, despite fancying myself a web developer, I hadn’t actually done any web development in over a year. So I set up a “fun and easy” confidence-booster for myself - “The Spring 2021 Web Development Challenge”. The rules were simple - complete ten projects in thirty days, exploring as many different tools and technologies along the way as possible.

Leading up to the start date, you could say I was a a touch too overconfident — my eyes tend to be bigger than my stomach when it comes to these projects. I fully expected to breeze through the month with no effort. Perhaps I’d need to read a little more documentation than usual, but surely my understanding of front-end development practices was complete enough that I could handle any flavor of framework that came my way.

Then it started. My experiences throughout are documented on the project site, but in summary: the project beat me down hard, shattering any confidence I had beforehand, and I was forced to consider, newly humbled as I was, whether I could honestly call myself any kind of developer at all.

What followed was a lot of self-indulgent philosophy that I’ll save for another time.

Anyway. When I eventually pieced myself back together, I realized two things. The first thing was that web development — modern, full-stack web development in particular — isn’t a matter of mastering individual tools and languages. It isn’t enough to know how everything works in isolation, and it still isn’t enough to know how boilerplate toolchains glue them together from a mile-high perspective. Without a reasonably-complete understanding of what happens to your code, from source to deployment, you are ultimately developing at the mercy of someone else.

The second thing I realized was that understanding toolchain composition and explaining it are very nearly the same thing. If I want to get better at it, one of the best things I can do is write about what I’m learning.

Dumb Questions, Long Answers

This all leads me to the main point of this blog. I want take the abstract, esoteric, or overlooked aspects of web development, piece them apart, and process them into something that someone like me can understand. Or, to put it another way: I have a lot of dumb questions about what I’m doing, and I want to answer them in the most indulgent manner possible.

So, what do I intend to put in this space? I expect to do a little coding, for one, but I will probably not be producing outright tutorials. There are already plenty of those for any given technology, and I don’t feel that adding my own to the pile would be useful. Also, don’t expect any long, in-depth, “deep-dive” treatments of the things I end up exploring. For one, I’m not talented enough for that. Secondly, I’m not all that interested in learning everything from the inside-out, which would be an unreasonable standard to hold a developer to anyway.

I’m looking for context. I want to tell the stories of how these tools came about, who made them and why, and why others would come to adore (or despise) them. I also want to examine how they work together, and what it really means for a developer to adopt them into their workflow - both the benefits and drawbacks. For lack of a better term, I’ll call this a “mid-dive“ sort of exploration: deeper than surface-level, but shallower than the in-depth.

I’ll take a look at other things along the way, too. The challenge highlighted several weak points beyond toolchains, UI/CSS layouts especially, and I wouldn’t mind applying the mid-dive lens to these topics where I’m able. And if I can think of anything I’m actually good at, I’ll share it here too.

No promises, though. I’m not at all qualified to be writing a programming blog.